Armonía Somers - The Naked Woman

The priest, a disgraced judge in a trial where he was also one of the accused, had been forced to observe events from the village hall. But it was his home that was burning. “Yes, fire, that is all you know!” he cried with righteous fury. They antagonized heaven and then bleated at the sky like sheep to slaughter. He was going to show them what the love of God, and John, and Peter truly was. But not covered in the cloth of lies. He would go naked too, as naked as she, the woman who was offering them the milk and honey of the Song of Songs.

“Hold him back, he’s gone mad!”

It was the same voice again, but now with a more shrill, feminine tone.

“Yes, hold me back if you can!” he seethed, knocking down a burly pair of peasants who had tried to pin his arms. “Let he who dares try to stop me!”

On the street, he began removing his clothes in the red glow of the flames, casting his garments in all directions: a rose caught in a whirlwind. A bony, olive body emerged, his chest and belly hollowed out, as though their bodily functions had been passed on to the curve of his spine. The skinny, naked man looked so pathetic, and yet so holy, that in the few moments he could be seen before he plunged into the flames, he reminded the bystanders of a defenseless, tender creature on its way back to a less arid world. The flames shot out beyond the building, threatening to devour the bushes in front. The village consciousness began to become aware of the real danger. From twig to twig, tree to tree, roof to roof, the whole settlement might be consumed. While crazy trials were being held in the street, their homes would be on the pyre. One man ran into his house to rescue a newborn baby, and then everyone followed suit, dispersing in all directions to protect the timber for which they had given so much.

The two prisoners were left alone next to the burning church, the gray-and-white dog still licking her prone master’s face.

The woodsman’s wife was lost in thought at the edge of the forest. In some ways, this forest without fences or warning signs was her prison. The last row of trees had often seemed to her like bars. But the truth was that there were certain things, nonsensical for the most part, that her brain would never be able to understand. In her small, orderly world, she had assigned a use, label, or fate to everything she could: the number of healthy trees, the ones that needed to be replaced, the buttons on her husband’s tartan shirt, the wine and cheese that needed to be stored, the faulty chimney damper, et cetera. And she didn’t have much in the way of ambition, nothing that couldn’t be achieved in the short day and miserable night that followed. Lately, however, her husband, a creature who never got lost and never changed, had begun to fail her. Healthy and well-fed, with those repugnant old desires now thankfully calmed, he had embarked upon a strange phase of hallucinations, a shameful, indescribable condition—indescribable because the right word did not exist. It was looking like it could be the end of one or the both of them when, an unimaginative being though she was, her mind came to the rescue: You only get one chance to decline next to your man, you only grow old together once, you can’t draw on experience. So you have to speculate and use your imagination. Maybe they were at a critical juncture in their lives, it occurred to her one sleepless night. Why shouldn’t men also suffer the effects of age? It does nothing but wear them down and sap at their vitality. And so she took responsibility for what would be her final duty. She learned to revel in the silences and to disappear like a ghost if he insisted on involving her in his senile deliriums.

She also had the option of escaping to the edge of the forest to look out impassively at the old village like she was observing an alternative reality. From there, she acquired a border guard’s instincts, which she enjoyed honing when her husband was close by planting or cutting down trees.

“Nathaniel!” she called to him. “Something’s going on in town. The bells were ringing until just a moment ago. And now there’s smoke, black smoke.”

He went on chopping. He chopped with fury, almost hatred, at the light triangle he had hewn into the trunk. As he drew the ax back from the wound in which the tree revealed its true age, his whole body was infused with a desperate tension; he was so brutally alive that at times it seemed as if the tree would tip over out of the sheer force of will contained in his contracted muscles. But there was also an opposing will, a determination not to give way, to resist the low blows and stay standing. The implacable struggle was brought to an end by a humiliating noise, a merciless cracking sound. And so the tree’s rebellion was quashed. The man had known exactly when it would come. He quickly snatched away the ax, wrapped a rope around the poor giant, and pulled savagely before jumping out of the way. As his old body swelled with blood, his adversary began to fall like a wheezing mummy with nothing to cling to. The air trembled with anticipation, listening out for the sound it had heard on other occasions, but it didn’t come. The executioner appeared to have forgotten his customary woodsman’s cry, which he still usually shouted even though he was the only woodsman in the forest. He stared at the log the way someone looks at a body, with a loving urge to etch what once was and never shall be again into his memory.

“Eve,” he said absentmindedly. “Yes, Eve, her hair smelled like that of a fine woman. And you couldn’t invent the scent that lingered on, someone left it…”

He tried to extract the smell from that of the fallen pine. But the tree had left a dirty cloud in the air: bugs, dry leaves, dust, bird shit. And the uproar continued beneath the earth, echoing through vegetable catacombs, rattling underground skeletons in a chaotic tangle of roots—mass love caught in a blind embrace. He knew the phenomenon better than anyone. A tree is never alone, as much as it may seem like it. Like men, they laze about, apparently on their own, but under the ground they wander who knows where in search of company. Then they emerge with their distinctive heads to fool those who only know how to count in single digits, like a child in their first years of school. He, for instance, had also thought he was alone. He thought that he had spent thirty years alone since his search for company had ended in what he had believed to be a genuine encounter. But his companion had evaporated right on the very steps where they had been joined during that fateful ceremony. And yet, perhaps at the very moment that his asinine coupling for life was occurring, the other woman was being born. The woman from two nights ago who had bewitched his nostrils with the scent of damp honeysuckle. As hard as he blew his nose, he couldn’t get rid of the aroma. But no more digressions; he was getting confused. The ground was still trembling from the felling of the pine, the shock galloped away under his feet. His wife was there, calling him over to see something happening in that damned village. If he didn’t want to torment himself to death with the memory of the perfume, he’d better take a look. Perhaps his nose would be distracted by the bells, or the smoke.

“Can you smell it, Nathaniel? A house must be on fire; they’re all made of wood and with the sun beating down hard like this… Poor souls.”

“Good riddance, I hope they all burn!” the man spat venomously. “So long as it doesn’t spread to the forest, so long as it’s not our forest, let it consume them all, worms living in rotten wood! They can never have enough trees, always wanting more. More and more wood, damn it!”